PARIS — “Come on baby, light my fire,” urged the ghost of the Lizard King.
We were just five days shy of the Opening Ceremony of the Games of the XXXIII Olympiad, and the sacred flame of Sport, obeying the long-dead rocker James Douglas Morrison, was making its way toward the Château de Vincennes on the eastern flank of Paris, just a headstone’s throw from the celebrity graveyard named for the royal confessor Père Lachaise.
The usual clot of gawkers had gathered around Morrison’s tomb, which has been an object of macabre pilgrimage since the singer/poet/sex-god died in 1971 at the age of 27, possibly from an overdose of heroin, in a bathtub in the 4th arrondissement. The current monument, which replaced a bust that was stolen 35 years ago, was strewn with flowerpots, cherubs and amateur portraits of the rock idol, and it had been enclosed within a wire fence as a guard against further adoration.
Groups of visitors far too young to remember Jim Morrison and the Doors in life paused to cluck in Italian and Polish and Turkish. A nearby tree was covered in wads of chewing gum in loving but unhygienic tribute. The corpse in the grave right next door — the redoubtable legislator Antoine Français, Comte de Nantes — who was born a subject of Louis XV in 1756 and who died eighty years later as a Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour — inspired neither devotion nor Doublemint.
In neighbouring plots at Père Lachaise mouldered the remains of Abélard and Héloïse, Chopin and Rossini, Montand and Piaf, Wilde and Balzac, Molière and Apollinaire, Proust and Bizet and Modigliani.
“I approve of any activity that requires the wearing of special clothing,” winked Oscar Wilde from the Other Side, noting the approach of the great multi-sport competition.
“Never underestimate the power of a dream,” trilled Edith Piaf, the Little Sparrow who was seven centimetres taller than Simone Biles.
“Another Fucking Olympic Games,” snarled a T-shirt in a window on the Avenue de Paris.
I had moved on to the too-precious shopping district of Vincennes, where the passing of the quasi-religious, multi-continental, 68-day, 20,000-kilometre torch relay was imminent. (It finally will conclude on Friday night with the lighting of a cauldron downtown. The torch relay for the 2026 Winter Games in Milan/Cortina will kick off about ten minutes later.)
The Château de Vincennes, whose courtyard the torch was going to traverse on the 63rd stage of its interminable peregrination, was as monumental and archetypal as a medieval French castle could be, with its drawbridge and moat, its Gothic Sainte-Chapelle and thick-walled fortress, its Pavilions of the King and Queen, its bloody 900-year history and its periodic capture by the English and the Germans.
I awaited the flame inside the castle walls along with a few hundred believers who were waving little pennants that had been handed out by eager volunteers. There were four mounted chevaliers and at least a dozen police cars escorting the torch-bearing contingent and a dozen wary accompanists walking alongside in matching grey T-shirts that were so tight that you could see the outline of their bulletproof camisoles.
A recruiting tent in the courtyard invited spoilsports to escape the Games of the XXXIII Olympiad entirely by joining the French Foreign Legion, but the officer in the classic white képi who staffed the booth — a bemedalled native of Nepal who said he had fought with the Legion “mostly in Africa” — told me that, alas, I was too old to enlist.
A few metres away, neglected in the tall grass near a grove of apple trees, was a rusted memorial to 29 French police officers and civilians who were massacred at the Château by the fleeing Nazis in 1944 and their bodies hurled into the moat. There was no chewing gum on the apple trees.
Now the runner of the hour, a fit, beaming man, walked — but did not run — down the gravel path toward the drawbridge and the Vincennes commercial district and the shop with the profane T-shirt. A woman from the official entourage followed a few steps behind, bearing a small brass and glass reliquary in which another tiny flame burned — a hedge against extinction, lit by the rays of the sun at Ancient Olympia on the Peloponnesus.
In the same way, in the year 1238, Louis IX presented to this same castle the True Cross and the spikes from the Crown of Thorns that he had obtained from the Emperor of Constantinople. And I thought: Like a holy relic, like Bitcoin, like a Wayne Gretzky rookie card, the Olympic Flame has value only because enough of us believe that it does — but this worth is neither intrinsic nor necessarily permanent.
A dozen times since its modern revival in Amsterdam in 1928, the Olympic Flame has been doused by world war and cold war, by wars over money and medicines, yet now it is nearly a century old and still burning. If crypto lasts that long and I do too, I’ll be rich when they put me in the Père Lachaise.